Aimé Césaire
Inventor of Souls
Black Lives
1. Auflage Januar 2025
304 Seiten, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Aimé Césaire is arguably the greatest Caribbean literary writer in history. Best known for his incendiary epic poem Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Césaire reinvented black culture by conceiving 'négritude' as a dynamic and continuous process of self-creation.
In this essential new account of his life and work, Jane Hiddleston introduces readers to Césaire's unique poetic voice and to his role as a figurehead for intellectuals pursuing freedom and equality for black people. Césaire was deeply immersed in the political life of his native Martinique for over fifty years: as Mayor of Fort-de-France and Deputy at the French National Assembly, he called for the liberation of oppressed people at home and abroad, while celebrating black creativity and self-invention to resist a history of racism.
Césaire's extraordinary life reminds us that the much-needed revolt against oppression and subjugation can--and should--come from within the establishment, as well as without.
Chapter One
1930s Paris and the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal: 'It is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre'
Chapter Two
Wartime Martinique, Tropiques, and Les Armes miraculeuses: 'Open the windows. Air. Air'
Chapter Three
Departmentalisation, Soleil cou coupé and Corps perdu: 'I Shall Command the Islands to Exist'
Chapter Four
The Political Upheavals of the 1950s: 'History I tell of the awakening of Africa'
Chapter Five
The Theatre of Decolonisation: 'One does not invent a tree, one plants it'
Chapter Six
Political and Poetic Disillusionment: 'I inhabit a Sacred Wound'
Afterword
Adlai Murdoch, Penn State University
"Jane Hiddleston succeeds in rendering a difficult writer eminently readable, and she moves effortlessly between her author's better known political positions and his commitment to poetry, the theatre and the essay."
A. James Arnold, University of Virginia
